Field Kit by KOMA Elektronik - an Electroacoustic Workstation

I stumbled across this today:

<p style=“font-family: “Helvetica Neue”, Helvetica, Arial, “Liberation Sans”, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(53, 53, 53); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);”>The new KOMA Elektronik Field Kit is the perfect tool for everyone who would like to experiment with electroacoustic sound. Use everyday objects, amplify them and use them to make sound, like our heroes John Cage and David Tudor used to do! <p style=“font-family: “Helvetica Neue”, Helvetica, Arial, “Liberation Sans”, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(53, 53, 53); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);”>The Field Kit is optimized to process signals from microphones, contact microphones, electromagnetic pickups and able to run DC motors and solenoids. On top of that it can receive radio signals and convert signals from switches and sensors into control voltage! <p style=“font-family: “Helvetica Neue”, Helvetica, Arial, “Liberation Sans”, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(53, 53, 53); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);”>

<span style=“color: rgb(53, 53, 53); font-family: “Helvetica Neue”, Helvetica, Arial, “Liberation Sans”, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: small; font-style: italic;”>https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/komaelektronik/field-kit-electroacoustic-workstation?ref=email

Hey, this is pretty slick. Be fun to try to wring something more conventionally musical out of it.

Can I use it as a mixer for the Pocket Operators?

Got my Field Kit today! It’s very compact sized. I was having crazy LFO-synced radio jams a couple of minutes after unboxing. Can’t wait to play around with it some more!

Nice video using the FieldKit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwJBCMM-qXE

^ no idea what’s happening here or what he’s doing but I LOVE it!

Yeah, Field Kit pairs quite nicely with OP-1. Had a quick jam last night, I used the LFO to sync the station changes of the radio and Kastle’s “sequencer”, had a drum sequencer running from the OP-1 manually synced, and used OP-1 as a master send effect for Kastle and the CV radio. On the fourth channel I had a contact mic. I really like the CV radio!

@vehka that’s sounds very interesting! How do you use the Op-1 as a master send, I’m unsure how to do that.

If you arm the external input for recording, live incoming audio gets processed by the master effect. The output passes the processed audio onwards, alongside whatever else is going on in the OP-1.

Ah of course, didn’t think about just arming it. Thanks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOMKuboPylY

Brief jam from last night: https://soundcloud.com/vehka/supplementary-traces

And here’s a photo, sorry for the double post!

If only they made it run from batteries or USB power pack it would have been (even more) awesome, I will probably end up designing my own version with different features more suited to live portable usage though.

Apparently it can be powered off a 9V battery: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/komaelektronik/field-kit-electroacoustic-workstation/comments.

@vehka Ahh cool, missed that!

I don’t have the field kit hardware but today for under I fiver I just bought a Contact Mic and a Phone Pickup Mic (both same as what you get with Field Kit) so hopefully I can hook them up to my ZoomH1 and grab some new sounds to sample and make music from.